Tag: twitter

The NFL Super Bowl is the world’s most sought after advertising space, however, is it really worth the money?

In 2015 over 114 million people watched the Super Bowl making it the most viewed program on television in America. A 30 second ad spot during the Super Bowl costs around $4M or roughly $35 per thousand impressions.

There are no surprises that advertising during the Super Bowl is comparatively expensive, but is it really worth it?

The 2015 Super Bowl saw the likes of Budweiser, Nationwide, Microsoft, Mophie, Dove, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz flaunt their most impressive creativity. Unfortunately for these brands it was not worth the $4M, they wasted it on poorly branded advertisements.

If you want to get the biggest bang for your buck at the Super Bowl (or in any ad) it’s essential that you:

Introduce your brand as soon as possible

Include the brand as often as possible

Ensure the brand is big enough and clear enough for viewers to see

If you use a Hashtag make sure it’s directly linked to your brand

The bulk of the ads shown during the 2015 Super Bowl lacked clear branding. If you look at the videos below you will notice how the brand is not mentioned or seen until the last few seconds. If your brand is not blatantly obvious don’t expect consumers to remember you. People do not pay full attention to advertising, roughly 1/3 will actively avoid TV ads by doing things such as switching channels or leaving the room, 1/3 will passively avoid by doing things such as playing on their phones or chatting to friends, and 1/3 will actually watch the ads. This makes it vitally important to be highly branded so even people not paying full attention will still recognise your brand. No matter how funny, sad, or beautiful the ad is, people will forget what is being promoted unless it’s well branded.

Secondly NONE of the hashtags in the examples below are branded either. Look at the list of Hashtags and see if you can guess what brand they belong to from the ones mentioned above:

Everyday over 500 million tweets are sent on Twitter making it increasingly important for brands to standout amongst the clutter. Your brand must be easily identifiable from your hashtag, otherwise you are wasting your time and money with an unownable, unmemorable, and unbranded communications.

The Loctite ad was a great example of clear branding. They managed to mention their brand 8 times in a 30 second ad, introduce the brand in the first few seconds, and create a catchy and distinctive jingle (see below), however, they also used an unbranded hashtag #WinAtGlue.

In every ad make your brand the focus of any communication, reach as many people as you can, and make your brand famous.

Dove Men + Care: #RealStrength no branding till the last 10 seconds

Mercedes-Benz: #TeamHare #TeamTortoise not seen in the first 30 seconds

Mophie: #StayPowerful not mentioned till the last 3 seconds of a 1 minute ad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuVsf_hE7gM

Budweiser: #BestBuds no branding till the last 4 seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAsjRRMMg_Q

Nationwide: No branding till the last 7 seconds
#MakeSafeHappen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKUy-tfrIHY

BMW: #HelloFuture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1jwWwJ-Mxc

Microsoft: #empowering No branding till the last 3 seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cw4jmKQs0E

We have seen media events broken via Twitter – or is it that the media focussed on Twitter as an additional story hook? Is it that Twitter’s limited 140 character capacity is forcing participants to provide brief and rapid updates – rather than longer, less frequent updates? Which is better?

So – what’s the future of Twitter? Is it a tool for media people to keep in touch with each other? Is it for self-promoters? Or will it evolve to become something largely useful, rather than just a handful of interesting things between tweets about outrage / quality sandwiches / coffees / weather?

It’s neither a mass broadcast mechanism nor is it targetted. Fine if you want to get a message out to a number of followers in a single moment, but terrible if you are using it for reach or for a more personal or limited conversation.

It’s very easy to set up, so there’s little in terms of “purchase investment”. You register, follow a few people and if you walk away / forget, it’s not like you’ve spent hours of your time – there’s little to “lose” by abandoning it.

It’s a media phenomenon. The media are going nuts over it, when the punters are far less interested. It’s like Second Life – not a day would go by when the media wouldn’t write about Second Life – it drove a spike in interest, but didn’t drive long term usage.

As written in a previous post, Twitter is for old people. Young people couldn’t care less and aren’t using it in any substantial numbers. Older people either don’t have the time, or the interest, so they join up, look around and leave after a while – they don’t keep the ball rolling.

It’s not customisable. I might enjoy some tweets of some people (person focussed), or some tweets by all people (topic focussed), but definitely not all tweets by all people. It needs to be customisable. Right now, whether I like it or not, I have to read the tweets of all of the people I follow on Twitter. You could argue that there are multiple plugins and applications that allow for customisation of Twitter, but the basic beginner user isn’t interested enough (or capable enough) to then look for filters and plugins. So they get bored / frustrated and stop using it.

Twitter is so limited, so simple, that old people don’t feel intimidated by it. Therefore, they can get involved without fear that they are inadvertently giving away their credit card details or friend’s details. After all, a lot of TWEETERS operate under a pseudonym.

Twitter isn’t very interesting. Compared to Facebook, Twitter is extremely limited. Younger people embrace neo–celebrity, that is – “the celebrity of me”. In the minds of this age group, “how can you truncate my brilliance into 140 characters”?

It may well be that the data is skewed by the fad of Twitter – how many older people aren’t actually on it, but are hearing a lot about it at the moment, therefore answer a survey question in the positive? (Nothing against Nielsen’s excellent methodology of course!)

And now… when teachers start teaching kids about Twitter, rather than the other way around, it makes me think it’s the new Second Life, ie: not great.